from the endless variety of forest, vale, and mountain; the same effect
should be produced on the ocean by an absence of all irregularity and
all change! A simple, level horizon, perfectly unbroken, a line of
almost complete uniformity, compose a grandeur that impresses and fills
the soul as powerfully as the most cloud-piercing Alp, or the Andes
clothed with thunder.

This was the ocean in calm; but how glorious, too, in tempest! The storm
that sweeps the land is simply a destroyer or a renovator; it smites the
surface, and is gone. But the ocean is the seat of its power, the scene
of its majesty, the element in which it sports, lives, and
rules--penetrating to its depths, rolling its surface in thunder on the
shore--changing its whole motion, its aspect, its uses, and, grand as it
is in its serenity, giving it another and a more awful grandeur in its
convulsion. Then, how strangely, yet how admirably, does it fulfil its
great human object! Its depth and extent seem to render it the very
element of separation; all the armies of the earth might be swallowed up
between the shores of the Channel. Yet it is this element which actually
combines the remotest regions of the earth. Divisions and barriers are
essential to the protection of kingdoms from each other; yet what height
of mountain range, or what depth of precipice could be so secure as the
defence so simply and perpetually supplied by a surrounding sea? While
this protecting element at the same time pours the wealth of the globe
into the bosom of a nation.

Even all this is only the ocean as referred to man. How much more
magnificent is it in itself! Thrice the magnitude of the land, the world
of waters! its depth unfathomable, its mountains loftier than the
loftiest of the land, its valleys more profound, the pinnacles of its
hills islands! What immense shapes of animal and vegetable life may fill